Over the past decades, an incredibly rich and diverse collection of computer implemented applications offering huge amounts of information and the ability to interact and request services directly from a variety of businesses has been deployed. In recent years, with the advance of Web-based applications, the rate of deployment has further accelerated.
The World Wide Web (hereafter, the Web) was originally conceived as an information sharing system. It provided a way for information owners to publish documents in a standardized format and to create “links” to related information anywhere on the Internet. These documents could be accessed using a simple, ubiquitous client providing essentially universal access. Although the Web was originally designed around mostly static content, people quickly realized it could be used to deliver applications. This was accomplished by dynamically generating the published information and by embedding processing instructions in the published documents. The Web rapidly evolved from an information sharing system to an application platform and before long, Web-based applications became the standard used by an increasing number of corporations, both internally and externally via the Internet.
Application developers should be able to synthesize new applications, i.e. composite applications, by integrating new, custom application logic and existing applications.
Further, a user of the new composite application should be able to see the new composite application being seamlessly tailored to that user and the new application, and not just a hodgepodge of different applications and styles placed together in an inconsistent or incompatible haphazard manner.
Moreover, it will be desirable for the new composite application to be provisioned without causing the original data and applications to be changed or disturbed in any substantial manner, nor requiring non-insubstantial support from the original application administrators and developers. It will be most desirable if the new application developer can present and use the existing applications and data in ways not necessarily even foreseen (or foreseeable) by the original developers and users.
However, each corporation—and often each department within a corporation—typically uses a different set of data, technologies, rules, and applications, and has no desire to change the way they work or rewrite existing applications. Additionally, administrators and developers associated with these applications may be unable or unwilling to devote any resources or time to supporting access to the applications; they are also typically resistant to externalizing interfaces to the applications, retrofitting integration adaptors or hooks, or adding administrative procedures or data just to suit the new application.
Thus, an improved approach is needed to provision composite applications formed from a number of underlying applications (typically, previously implemented), in the above described desired manner, overcoming the disadvantages and difficulties of the prior art.